I like Forest and its add-ons a lot. It looks phenomenal. But as already mentioned, it is a very resource intensive environment prop. I do all my renders in LuxRender, and while Lux can load the environment just fine (so long as you have the memory for it), it cuts render speed to 1/10th of what I normally get. So I use it selectively.

The most popular render I've done with it so far (based on dA views and favorites) is Forest Purple.

It's a good product. My only picked nit is that the trees/grass/rocks/etc. in the original forest product all load in clumps at preset locations making it harder to break the scene up and use parts of it. The creator has acknowledged this issue in the original release thread and stated that he would consider breaking them up in the future and/or providing zero position single instances in future products.

I have often wished to turn off parts of it, but you can't really do that. It's def heavy on resource and renders really slow. I had a hard time getting a really decent night render with it. It's a gorgeous set though.

Hah! I like the suggestion. I ended up buying it is a good price, I admit I am a bit wondering how the grass will render on my system. I like more realistic ground, but the trees and stuff look good. I will test it tonight and see what I think.

I like elements of the forest, such as the river and trees, but I've decided I'm not very fond of this particular set. The grass in particular just doesn't have the dimension or quality I'm lookng for. Thanks for everyone for the advice. =-)

If the hair products that are being developed by AM & the Garibaldi for DS come out sooner rather than later. Either one could be utilized to achieve the grass effects that you are looking for.... maybe!

I like elements of the forest, such as the river and trees, but I've decided I'm not very fond of this particular set. The grass in particular just doesn't have the dimension or quality I'm lookng for. Thanks for everyone for the advice. =-)

If you need something in the nearer term, for grass, you could try Predatron's Grass, or, if you're looking for something that will work in medium distance renders, First Bastion's Hilly Surround. No trees in either, but depending on what you need to do, you could get some of Merlin's trees for that as well.

Using a lot of Predatron's Grass WILL slow down your system a bit. And even though I ubersurfaced it within an inch of its life, it does take ages to render.

Unfortunately that isn't supported when you export as on OBJ so it doesn't help external renders. And even a plugin I am waiting for said it won't be able to use instances in DS 4.5 for a bit. And tools like infinito don't support instances.

So yeah if you can instance it, go for it. But even when I did that it still had a noticeable impact on my system. More so than a character with a 13 piece outfit.

I like elements of the forest, such as the river and trees, but I've decided I'm not very fond of this particular set. The grass in particular just doesn't have the dimension or quality I'm lookng for. Thanks for everyone for the advice. =-)

A lot depends on personal style, lighting, and most important camera angle. Here are two images I did (not sure of gamma on either since they were done on two different pc's).

The one with the Klipspringer in the middle was the camera load of the scene. There was a huge tree blocking the view. I selected it and made it invisible. The autumn one was obviously a higher angle and the grass panels are more obvious.

here is an image of the "forest superior" I have rendered with just one distant light/deep shadow map and 4 distant lights without shadow for environment light. Unfortunatelly for ray trayced shadow I need a new machine. Have rendered another with a bathing beauty that I have uploaded only at renderosity because of nudity and where I first have tried ray traced shadow but after 4 hours just 47% were rendered and that is a bit to slow for me, so for me only deep shadow map is an option for the forest sets but I have bought them also because of the single prop set (new stuff) "forest elements"

(my name there at rendo if you want to visit my gallery there is the same as here: cosmo71)